Parents lost at three, life lost at 37

Chinsurah, July 28: Sub-inspector Amit Chakraborty lost his parents when he was three, left college and joined the police force to fund his sister’s education at 22 and died today at 37.

Sharmistha Mukherjee, Chakraborty’s cousin whose father raised the sub-inspector and his sister Amrita in his Chinsurah home, today said: “Amitda was the lone earner in the family. I don’t know what the assailants gained by killing him.”

The 23-year-old said the family did not want “any kind of politics over his death” but “did not know how we will live without him”.

Chakraborty, who was unmarried, died today at a private hospital in Durgapur after battling for life for 55 days, having undergone seven “critical” surgeries and prolonged ventilation support.

Chakraborty was a sub-inspector from the 2008 batch and was posted in Dubrajpur in Birbhum. He was hit by a bomb on June 3 by suspected Trinamul supporters when he tried to save a CPM cadre’s house from being torched and suffered splinter injuries in his abdomen.

“He struggled a lot in life from the beginning. When he was three, he lost his parents in a gap of six months at their home in Bud Bud (Burdwan),” Sharmistha said.

Orphaned at three, Chakraborty and his sister Amrita came to live with his paternal aunt and uncle Lakshmi Narayan Mukherjee at Rathtala in Chinsurah. Mukherjee worked in Dunlop then.

In 1999, Chakraborty, a second-year student of Hooghly Mohsin College, got the job of a police constable on compassionate grounds as his father was a constable too.

He left college when he was 22 and joined the force to fund his sister’s higher studies.

He later graduated in English from the Netaji Open University.

Chakraborty got the job of a sub-inspector in 2008 through the public service commission. He got sister Amrita married in December last year.

“It was dada who bore the expenses of my education after my father retired. I would have completed my post-graduation this year. But for the past one-and-a-half months, we had been staying in a hotel near the (Mission) hospital in Durgapur. We could not save him,” said Sharmistha, a graduate in library science.

“My father has been depressed since the day dada was attacked. We have no words to console him,” Sharmistha said. Lakshmi Narayan Mukherjee is 76 years old.

Trinamul MLA Asit Majumdar today visited the family in Chinsurah and assured them that he would request the chief minister to arrange for a job for her.